FILM

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Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom

By Phil Lemos

Genetic engineering of dinosaurs is like corruption in government—everybody agrees it needs to be stopped and yet somehow it keeps happening.  Both concepts collide early in Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom when Dr. Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) testifies before a U.S. Senate hearing that the dinosaurs of Isla Nublar should be left to perish from an impending volcanic eruption.

     That, of course, would make for a short movie.  But against this backdrop begins the latest sequel in the Jurassic Park franchise.  An expedition returns to the island to collect dino-specimens, recruiting Clare Dearing and Owen Grady (Bryce Dallas Howard, Chris Pratt) for expertise and assistance.  What seems like an altruistic mission takes a sinister turn when Clare and Owen realize the soldiers are mercenaries bringing the dinosaurs to America to auction them off, and for more genetic tinkering.  That tinkering spawns the Indoraptor, a Velociraptor/Indominus rex-hybrid and the movie’s resident killing machine. 

     An uneven plot hampers character development, leading to cartoonish antagonists and detracting from the ethical issues the movie raises.  But, as expected, the dinosaurs steal the show.  A Brachiosaurus screaming for help on the lava-consumed shore after missing the rescue ship plucks at your heartstrings.  And the climactic title bout doesn’t disappoint when the Indoraptor and Blue the Velociraptor battle on the rain-soaked roof of the auction estate. 

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Phil Lemos  is a current degree candidate at The Mountainview Low Residency MFA in Fiction and Nonfiction.

Student Picks: Burg, Mann, and Robbins

Arun Chittur-- I train technical instructors and study teams large and small, so lately I’ve strayed from my regular selections of fiction and narrative nonfiction in favor of books that illuminate some part of the puzzle that is humanity. My wife recommended The Go-Giver; we were waiting to board a plane from the East to West Coast when I started reading the Foreword. I finished the powerful, yet concise story before we landed four hours later.

The Go-Giver is advertised as a parable, 150 pages written by two businessmen-turned-writers inspired to craft a story from decades spent observing the world. They rely on a diverse cast of characters but focus on two: Joe, a salesman struggling to meet his upcoming quarterly quota, and Pindar, an otherwise hard-to-describe “Old Man” who acts as mentor and coach to many in town. Desperate for counsel on how to meet his numbers, Joe meets with Pindar and is soon absorbed in a week-long lesson on the “Five Laws of Stratospheric Success.” And so ensues an adventure of sorts, a story that follows Joe’s rapid evolution from stereotypical salesman to someone who adds value to others’ lives.

It’s easy to get lost in the narrative, and to forget that it’s mainly fiction designed to make accessible one of life’s simplest but often overlooked principles. I’d recommend this book to anyone, not just for its ability to help provide focus and direction, but for the example it provides in the instructive power of story.

Phil Lemos-- Good Friday is known for its executions. But Gwendolyn Mati, squeaky-voiced stockbroker and protagonist of the Tom Robbins novel Half-Asleep in Frog Pajamas, wishes she had already been sentenced to death when the stock market crashes the day before.

It’s bad enough Gwen is sweating out whether she’ll have any clients left when the market re-opens the following Monday. But she also has to spend the weekend searching the streets of Seattle for her missing 300-pound psychic and her slacker boyfriend’s missing pet monkey, while also avoiding a creepy stranger with mind-altering substances who wants to rock her world and take her to Africa with him.

Half-Asleep in Frog Pajamas is notable not only for Robbins’ signature irreverent humor and bold use of metaphor, but also for being written in second-person. The use of second-person in fiction is always a gamble, as it can backfire spectacularly. It works here, though, as we’re dropped into an immediate crisis - the stock market crash - and the subversion lends itself well to taking chances with characterization and style. Robbins is known more for other novels, but Half-Asleep is a hidden jewel any fan of comedy in fiction would enjoy.

Shopping Carts and Good Feelings

by Phil Lemos

I have this part-time job where I change ads on supermarket shopping carts.  The company assigned me a route of 15 stores in the Worcester area.  Every month they send boxes of ads and an email spelling out which ads go in which stores.  I spend a couple of hours at each store swapping out the old ads for new ones. 

I’ll be working on a carriage in the shopping cart vestibule when a customer asks me what aisle the quinoa is in.  I tell them that I work for a third-party vendor, not the supermarket, so I really don’t know but I’m sure the customer service desk can point them in the right direction; and they call me an unhelpful jerk and tell me they’ll be sure to speak to my supervisor about me; which they won’t because, as previously mentioned, I don’t work for the supermarket.

Today, I’m ad-changing the Stop & Shop around the corner from my place.  Near the store entrance is a guy at a desk with pamphlets and a clipboard.  I avoid eye contact to discourage him from talking to me and start working on carts.  A few minutes later, a woman comes in looking for a carriage.

“What’s that guy hitting people up for?” she asks me.

“He’s trying to get people to sign a petition to get a candidate on the ballot this fall,” I say.

“Jesus.  For what?”

“I dunno.  I was trying to avoid him.”  I slide another ad into a cart frame, thinking she’s on her way to the deli.  I’d grab another cart but she’s in my way.

“People better wake up.  This country’s going to hell in a handbasket,” she says.

“For sure.”  I really thought she’d be inside by now.

“I mean aren’t you disgusted with all that’s going on?”

Maximizing efficiency in this job is an art form.  If you go early in the morning or late at night, the store is less busy and there are more empty carts.  The downside to that, though, is that it means about 300 carts are jammed into a tiny vestibule and that gives you no room to maneuver and you end up doing cart gymnastics to get to the way-back carriages.  That’s no fun, and who the hell wants to get up at 5am to slide ads into shopping-cart frames?  It’s easier to go in the afternoon.  A lot of the carts are in use, but there’s more room to move the others around.

This lady is messing with my process.  She’s beginning to gain a following.  Four or five other customers are now listening to her rant and getting similarly fired up.

“This has gotta stop.”

“Are you registered to vote?”

“Damn right I am.”

“We need to get organized.”

I’m trapped.  I try to gesture toward the other carts a couple of times but they’re not paying any attention because this woman is on a roll.  All she’s missing is a bullhorn.  While I’m an hourly employee, it’d be a tough sell to my bosses that it took me 9 hours to ad-change this store because some woman started a political rally in the cart vestibule.

The demonstration is now up to about seven or eight people.  The guy outside definitely struck a nerve.  Meanwhile, the store manager has also walked over to see what’s going on.  I’ve had enough.  I’d like to be home in time to watch the Celtics playoff game that starts in about 90 minutes.

“Excuse me!” I say.  “I’m kinda wedged in between everybody here, and I have to swap out the ads on all these carts.  Is there any way I could get you to scooch over just a bit?”

“Oh, I’m sorry, I thought you were another customer,” the first lady says. 

She and her posse head inside to change the world.  The rally in front of me dissolves.  I remember a simpler time when politics didn’t interfere with part-time jobs.  An era of good feelings.  This is why we need to get James Monroe back in the White House.

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Phil Lemos is a current degree candidate at The Mountainview Low Residency MFA in Fiction and Nonfiction.

Student Picks: Beatty and Evans

Phil Lemos-- The first-person narrator of Paul Beatty’s hilariously uncomfortable novel The Sellout, referred to only by his last name of “Me,” has made some awkward decisions.

Me is a black man who owns a slave. He’s the de facto caretaker of his hometown, an “agrarian ghetto” on the outskirts of Los Angeles by the name of Dickens. He runs a profitable business growing square watermelons and lots of weed. And he’s ridiculed by Foy Cheshire, leader of a group known as The Dum Dum Intellectuals. He calls Me a sellout, and Cheshire extols the virtues of his own watered-down edition of an American classic, titled “The Pejorative-Free Adventures and Intellectual and Spiritual Journeys of African-American Jim and His Young Protégé, the White Brother Huckleberry Finn, As They Go in Search of the Lost Black Family Unit.” Things come to a head when Me tries to reintroduce segregation to Dickens, culminating in the Supreme Court case “Me vs. The United States of America.”

The Sellout is full of moments both cringe-worthy and laugh-out-loud funny, sometimes simultaneously. It’s a sharp satire of race relations in a supposedly post-racial America, and of how we try to simultaneously rewrite and bury the past.    

Tara Ridell-- Danielle Evans’ collection of short stories, in a word, is sharp. The 8 parts that make up the book are saturated with humility and strength. Each story is devised of original characters that are connected by a precise design to trudge beyond their own mess.

In “Virgins,” Evans explores the nuance of sexuality through Erica, an already-jaded young girl. The author’s delicate prose cradles the deflated self-value of her character, illuminating an issue of confidence most young women contend with regarding their own bodies.

Evans’ writing is infused with compassion and benevolence, which is refreshing, as it is not always the sentiment put forth to characters of color. The piece “Snakes,” is a tale of a young girl of mixed race sent to live with her white grandmother while her parents are traveling. The battle that ensues over the child’s image via her natural hair is uncomfortable to read and counsels the reader to admit what is truly going on.

Whether writing about a veteran fixed in his own psychological purgatory (“Someone Ought to Tell Her There’s Nowhere to Go”), or a youth entrenched in tragedy (“King of a Vast Empire”), Evans’ fluid use of prose gives one breath to the many heartbeats in this work.

Student Picks: Bachelder and Henderson

Phil Lemos-- Aficionados of male ritual, 2 ½-star hotels and mangled legs will love Chris Bachelder’s The Throwback Special. It’s the story of 22 men who converge at a hotel annually to re-enact the infamous play from a 1980s Monday Night Football game in which Lawrence Taylor gruesomely shattered Joe Theismann’s leg on national television, ending his career. A lottery system, aided by a complex addendum of rules – you can’t be LT more than once in an eight-year span, the last person selected is Theismann, among others – determines which character portrays which player. 

Casting a virtual makeshift football team in such a short (213 pages) novel yields confusing results, both in mid-life crises and in name — there’s a Chad, a Charles and a Carl; a Randy and an Andy; a Dennis and a Derek.  

But the men, in a way, are one singular character, whose personal strife is their common bond outside of football. These men suffer from fully involved mid-life crises, whether it be failing careers, questioning of their own manhood, crumbling marriages, or a combination thereof, and they manifest themselves in the most bizarre and random situations, such as during the hotel’s continental breakfast and “stage fright” during trips to the bathroom stall.

Shawna-Lee Perrin-- Details reveal a writer’s willingness to linger in a scene and highlight the parts with exceptional emotional weight. Smith Henderson’s Fourth of July Creek is stuffed with multi-faceted characters and weighty topics, but it’s his attention to detail that makes certain scenes exceptionally haunting.

On Pete the narrator’s cabin: “...a front room with his bed, a leather chair, a kerosene lamp and an electric lantern, two shelves of books, and a bureau... a hatch in the floor led into a root cellar where he kept his milk, beer, and vegetables.” That beer is one of three things he keeps in the cellar is a subtle hint at Pete’s goals of living a simple, but not dour or monastic, life. 

After Pete’s father dies, the relics of his last day reveal Pete’s reluctant affection, despite the complicated, distant relationship they’d had: “An odor of leather, sawdust, and lilac... A half cup of coffee where he’d left it... an unpromising game of solitaire. His father had gotten up when he saw he wouldn’t win.”

I find myself reflecting on this book when I realize I’ve rushed through writing something; it’s a priceless study in slowing way down and really looking around.

Student Picks: Russell, Lahiri

Phil Lemos-- Karen Russell’s novel Swamplandia! is an imaginative tale about the Bigtree family’s attempts to keep the titular island theme park afloat after the death of the family matriarch/star alligator wrestler and the simultaneous opening of a rival park on the Florida mainland. 

Daughter Ava begins Swamplandia!, narrating the scene of the theme park in its heyday; it was not only the place to be in the Ten Thousand Islands chain off the coast of the Everglades, but in all of southwestern Florida. Meanwhile, oldest child Kiwi uncovers information that the theme park’s financial woes are worse than Chief Bigtree (the father) is letting on. Kiwi leaves Swamplandia! for the mainland, ostensibly for a scholarship opportunity. In reality, he’s leaving to work at rival World of Darkness. 

In the style of a bildungsroman, the novel alternates point of view between Ava and Kiwi. It also serves as a sort of national epic for Florida: the secluded island of Swamplandia! and the mainland’s Loomis County/World of Darkness respectively stand in for rural Old Florida and urban, cosmopolitan New Florida. With a great narrative voice and wild imagination, after reading Swamplandia! you’ll never see Florida, or alligator wrestling, the same way again.

Shawna-Lee Perrin-- In Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies, a thread of isolation runs throughout the nine short stories; Lahiri bookends this collection with two couples handling their unique forms of isolation differently.

In “A Temporary Matter,” Shoba and Shukumar are a married couple living nearly separate lives after a pregnancy that ended tragically. They didn’t heal as a couple, instead splintering and self-isolating. Lahiri deftly weaves the tale of a couple growing apart, and ultimately hurting each other deeply.

Conversely, in “The Third and Final Continent,” Lahiri follows the relationship between an Indian man (the narrator) and woman (Mala) in an arranged marriage; it’s strained, because the narrator has already established his own life in Boston, but had to marry and move Mala with him from India to the US. Initially, the marriage is strange and foreign to them; but instead of the rift Shoba and Shukumar experienced from their shared trauma, Mala and the narrator grow to love and comfort each other, make a happy life together, and raise a family.

All of Interpreter of Maladies’ characters are either in unfamiliar environs, or unfamiliar emotional territory; it reminds us that the importance of compassion cannot be overemphasized.

Student Picks: Everett, Zumas

Phil Lemos-- Once upon a time, a woman named Portia Poitier bore a son, and not wanting him to be confused with an acting icon, she named him Not Sidney Poitier. So begins the Percival Everett novel I Am Not Sidney Poitier, as well as the life of the titular character. 

It’s not long before Not Sidney’s mother dies, and a secret is revealed—despite residing in lower-middle-class Los Angeles, she owned a fortune in stock from Turner Broadcasting Group, which draws interest from Ted Turner himself, who adopts Not Sidney. As the fictitious memoir evolves, Not Sidney finds himself not only passing for the famous actor’s doppelganger, but also finding himself in plights absurdly similar to situations Poitier’s characters faced in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, In the Heat of the Night and Lilies in the Field.

The novel’s in-joke is, inevitably, doomed to get tired fast – every time Not Sidney introduces himself to a new character, a dialogue as familiar as an Abbott & Costello routine erupts. That said, as a study in absurdist satire, sharp dialogue, and a critique of just how our own identities are informed, I Am Not Sidney Poitier is a worthy and hilarious read.

Margaret McNellis-- Red Clocks by Leni Zumas has been compared to Margaret Atwood’s A Handmaid’s Tale for its dystopian elements, particularly concerning reproductive rights. Red Clocks is especially chilling because it could be possible in the near future. The world Zumas builds is not so different from our own, with differences only in policy—except those differences have both broad and deep consequences. Zumas masterfully presents this world through the eyes of four main characters—five if you count the story within a story.

While the first fifty pages or so can be challenging, this book is worth sticking with, and at that point, it gets easier to connect with the many characters’ points-of-view as their lives begin to intersect in both comfortably predictable and surprising ways. With as many chilling moments as there are heartwarming moments, Zumas crafts a story that presents an America so different, and yet so similar, to our own contemporary nation.

On the perils of not having a mobile banking app

by Phil Lemos

A couple weeks ago I started a new job.  When I was in the HR office signing reams of paperwork, including a direct deposit pay sheet, they told me for the first pay cycle I might receive a paper check.

This morning I trudge downstairs to check the mail and see, as predicted, a check from my employer.  I glance at the grey skies outside.  The check, of course, would arrive on a morning when we’re expecting a foot of snow. Honestly, I’d rather stay holed up in my apartment.  But the only thing I want less than being out and about during a snowpocalypse is to have a paper check lying around, undeposited.  The nearest branch of my bank is about 10 minutes away. I make a dash for it. 

I walk into the branch, endorse the back of the check and walk up to the teller.  Even in the era of automatic bank transfers, it seems like such a simple task.  Sign, hand over, receive deposit receipt.  In and out.

There are three people in line in front of me, engaged in various transactions and running into various snags in the process, which lengthens my wait time.  After 10 minutes, I draw Sasha in the bank teller window lottery.  Sasha looks at the check, asks me a couple of questions, glances at the computer screen in front of her, and I think I’m on my way when she asks:

“It appears you don’t have our mobile check deposit app,” Sasha says.

Yeah…so what?  I’m here.  It appears I don’t need it right now.

“If you had it, you could take a picture of your check and deposit it electronically,” she continues.

I don’t say anything.  All I want to do is deposit this check and get home before the roads become too slick.  I look behind me, out the window, and I see the first snowflakes begin to fall.

“I’ll go print the form out so we can set it up for you,” Sasha says.

“Honestly,” I say, “I just want to deposit this and leave before the storm hits.”

“Oh, no, it’ll be really quick.  I’ll be right back.”

“I SAID….”

Sasha freezes.  The teller in the other window, stops in the middle of her transaction to look at me.  The other customer, an older lady who clearly also doesn’t have the mobile app but isn’t being trolled about it, looks at me, petrified, as if thinking, “This is how my life ends.”  Someone who appears to be a branch manager type, who had just emerged from an office, freezes in place.

I glance upward and, for the first time, notice that I’m also wearing a winter hat and, inexplicably for such a gloomy day, sunglasses that I forgot to remove upon entrance as per bank branch protocol.  

“Is everything OK?” the other teller asks.

I lower my voice slightly. 

“I said…I want to deposit this and go home before the snow gets out of control.  We can sign me up another time.”

Sasha forgets about setting me up with that app.  She completes the transaction and hands me a deposit slip.  Nobody in the building has uttered a word since I spoke.  “Thank you,” I say, as I leave the branch.

I’ve weaponized my voice many times before.  My voice carries, and I have a way of treating every life obstacle, such as maintaining proper work flow, or impending snow, like a crisis-level event.  At my old warehouse job, I yelled so loudly the entire building could hear, and was asked on more than one occasion if I have Viking blood in me. This weaponization is not something I’m necessarily proud of, and I’ve had uncomfortable meetings with everyone from my bosses to HR to discuss it.

I get home, safely sheltered before the snow slickens the road.  A couple of days later I receive an email.

“As a valued customer of The Bank, your feedback is vital to help us improve the services we provide. You are invited to participate in a brief online survey regarding your recent visit.”

I rate my recent interaction with Sasha with all 5’s (“indispensable service”).  Two days ago, I would’ve hit the radio buttons on the opposite end of the spectrum.  But I’ve had time to think about how I conducted myself.

Also, I really need to download that mobile banking app.

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Phil Lemos is a current degree candidate at The Mountainview Low Residency MFA in Fiction and Nonfiction.

Eric's Workshop

by Phil Lemos

PROFESSOR: Well, thanks for reading an excerpt from your submission, Eric. That was certainly chilling.  So, I’ll open this to the group now.  What do we like about this?

(Silence)

PROFESSOR: What do we think?  What’s working here?

STUDENT A: I dunno I thought it was kinda ‘meh.’

PROFESSOR: So, two things.  Typically, we want to start with something the author has done well.  And I think if we want to be helpful to Eric, then I think it’s important that we give him more specific, concrete examples of what we’re talking about.  Do we have any examples of what was so ‘meh’?

STUDENT B: I just wasn’t buying it.  First of all, you have this country, Oceania, that isn’t in Australia where Oceania is in real life – it’s like, the entire Western Hemisphere plus England, because this seems to take place in London.  Yet London isn’t part of England?  It’s like, there’s no way this would ever possibly happen.

STUDENT C: Yeah, I’m Canadian, and there’s no way we’re letting Oceania annex us.  

PROFESSOR: OK, let’s talk about world-building.  How does—

STUDENT B:  What is Airstrip One?  Why does Winston live in an airport?

ERIC: He doesn’t live in an airport, Airstrip One is—

PROFESSOR: Remember, Eric, you’re still “in the box.”  You’ll get a chance to address these comments at the end.

STUDENT D: It’s just really hard to suspend disbelief here.

PROFESSOR: Could you elaborate on that?

STUDENT D: These characters believe whatever this Big Brother guy tells them.    He spreads this nonsense like, 2 + 2 = 5, and they’re always talking about how they’re about to win the war, but it never happens and—

STUDENT C: Why do they keep fighting? Who fights a war for 10 or 15 years?

STUDENT D: – and, anyway, the rank and file characters believe everything they’re told.  It’s just really insulting to the intelligence of humans in general.  These prominent people spread whatever factoid they want, and this segment of the population believes it, no questions asked?  That’s not how it works.  People have brains.  They can think critically.

STUDENT C: Wait…I’m confused.  Was Big Brother the president?  Or the host of the TV show?

ERIC: NO!  Big Brother was—

PROFESSOR: Eric, I think I’ve established the rules.  If you continue to interrupt we’re going to have to stop the workshop.

ERIC (muttering under his breath): This is ridiculous.

STUDENT E: Why are they so mad at Emmanuel Goldstein?  And why is it that all the scheming bad guys have to be Jewish?  Like, for once, could the bad guy be German? Or Muslim?

STUDENT C: This is more a comment than a question – you should use a grammar check before you submit these workshop samples, because there were a lot of sloppy grammatical errors.

PROFESSOR: Do you have any examples?

STUDENT C: Well, for starters, Thoughtcrime is two separate words, not one.  “Thought” and “crime.”  Same with doublethink.   

STUDENT A: Yeah, I noticed that too.        

STUDENT B: Me too.

STUDENT C: You’re not using the words correctly.

(Eric crumples up his paper.)

PROFESSOR: Does anybody have any other questions?

STUDENT B: I mean, yeah but, I feel like there are too many questions to go over here.

(Silence)

STUDENT C: You know what this piece needs? More of a Gone With the Wind thing to the love story.

PROFESSOR: OK, so now we can turn thing over to you, Eric.  Do you have any questions for us?

(Silence)

PROFESSOR: Eric? This is your opportunity to address some of the things we discussed about your workshop piece.  You seemed like you had some things to say earlier.

PROFESSOR: Well?

ERIC: Never mind, I think it’s pretty obvious that we’re all beyond hope. (Grabs his papers, gets up from the table and leaves.)

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Phil Lemos is a current degree candidate at The Mountainview Low Residency MFA in Fiction and Nonfiction.

If U.S. Presidents were Novels

by Phil Lemos

In my ongoing efforts to understand the world in literary terms, I find myself wondering which novel each U.S. president would be.  Some of them (James Garfield, Martin van Buren) would be obscure novels of little importance.  Others would be more interesting.

Here are some of the results I’ve settled on:

GEORGE WASHINGTON: Charlotte Temple, by Susanna Rowson. A young woman is seduced by an English soldier and brought to America, where he subsequently mistreats and abandons her.  The first best-selling novel in the new nation was in many ways a metaphor for the Thirteen Colonies’ struggle for independence.  Just as Charlotte Temple established themes and trends in American literature, such as tales of seduction and the virtues of resistance, Washington established precedents for the nation’s head of state (e.g. accepting a salary for being president even though it was against his personal wishes, retiring after two terms).

THOMAS JEFFERSON: Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov.  Jefferson is a celebrated—Founding Father, served two terms of peace and economic prosperity—and controversial—constitutionality of the Louisiana Purchase, dropping Vice-President Aaron Burr from the ticket after his first term—president with a complex and sometimes unflattering—slave owner—legacy.  He’s paralleled by a critically celebrated and controversial novel about an ugly topic: sexual desire for underage girls.  Unresolved? Whether Jefferson would engage in cross-country travel with a 12-year-old girl, or send Lolita away with Lewis and Clark during their voyage to Oregon Country.

WILLIAM HENRY HARRISON: The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil, by George Saunders. At 130 pages, TBAFROP barely qualifies as a novel – it’s generally referred to as a novella.  And with a 31-day tenure as chief executive before dying of pneumonia, William Henry Harrison barely qualifies as a president.  Because his presidency was a mere blip in American history, we don’t know if WHH’s policy initiatives would’ve advocated genocide, as President Phil did by forcibly disassembling his neighborly Inner Hornerites following a border dispute with Outer Horner.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN: To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee.  I’m resisting the temptation to go with Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter, despite Lincoln’s prowess at conquering the undead.  His courage and leadership in tackling issues of race during the American Civil War were emulated in a more literary form a century later in the form of Atticus Finch and his daughter Scout, who live in a South still reeling from the effects of the war.  Also, like Atticus, Lincoln spent time as a practicing lawyer.

FRANKLIN DELANO ROOSEVELT: Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut.  Just as FDR eschewed tradition by running for and winning a third – and later a fourth – term as president, Kurt Vonnegut subverted the rules of fiction by inserting hand-drawn pictures into the narrative, telling the story in a non-chronological fashion, and by means of a narrator who breaks the fourth wall and introduces himself.  It also makes sense for FDR to be represented by a novel that takes place partially during World War II, in which the firebombing of Dresden plays a key role.

RONALD REAGAN: The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald.  It was “Morning in America” during Reagan’s presidency.  Americans were generally happy with the direction of the country and propelled Reagan to two landslide victories.  Meanwhile, it’s the late-night side of morning in Gatsby, as the swingers of 1920s Long Island pursue the Jazz Age version of the American Dream.  Alas, nobody got what they ultimately wanted in Gatsby, and while the 1980s were generally an era of prosperity and the end of the Cold War, they also foreshadowed huge budget deficits and the coming War on Terror. 

BILL CLINTON:  Fifty Shades of Grey, by E.L. James.  Just because.

DONALD TRUMP: Moby-Dick, by Herman Melville.  An enraged leader out for revenge against an object of dubious hazard, rallying people formerly on the fringes of society to lash out in support of his cause, ignoring foreshadowing and historical analogies along the way.  “Call me Ishmael” is one of the most famous opening lines of a novel ever written, while “covfefe” is one of the most famous accidental tweets ever written. The novel doesn’t end well; everyone but the narrator dies in the end, while Moby Dick swims away, unvanquished.  The fate of the nation?  To be determined.

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Phil Lemos is a current degree candidate at The Mountainview low-residency MFA in Fiction and Nonfiction.

How Writing a Novel is like Managing a Warehouse

by Phil Lemos

I’m writing a novel.  Occasionally I get asked what that’s like.  I tell them it’s exactly like managing a warehouse.  

I work graveyard shift four nights a week as an assistant shift manager at a warehouse near where I live.  Running a warehouse involves unlocking the doors every night, plotting out a game plan for how to tackle the expected volume, and putting all the associates in the right places to maximize flow and efficiency.  Then you record all this information on your laptop so you don’t lose any critical information.  This all happens before the rank and file enter the building.  Once everyone arrives, you make a few announcements, turn on the conveyor belt and the shift begins.

No matter how meticulously you plan in advance, it’s inevitable that the night descends into chaos.  A handful of people won’t show up for their shifts (this number climbs to considerably more than a handful if the Patriots played earlier that evening), leaving gaps that you have to fill.  It’s inevitable that a giant box containing laundry detergent, paint or chlorine will fall off the belt and spill all over one of the aisles.  Twice a week the conveyor belt jams or breaks down.  Sometimes it’s an easy fix.  But conveyor belts can be temperamental, and often you find yourself calling the warehouse engineer at 2am to get him in and troubleshoot it. 

From their first couple of shifts, every employee thinks that they, too, can run the warehouse.  They spend all their time complaining about what the managers do wrong – how we push the volume too fast, too slow, run one line faster than the other, purposely give them shitty scanners that always crap out on them (even though they themselves hit the wrong button and caused it to crap out), screw them over by putting them in the hard aisles or making them work with the shitty employees.  While they do this belly-aching, all the packages that they’re supposed to be picking up slide past them on the belt. 

The three days a week that I’m not working at the warehouse, I cram in as much time as possible working on my novel.  Writing a novel involves unlocking your imagination, mapping out a skeletal version of your manuscript’s structure, and organizing the chapters properly to maximize flow and readability.  Then you record all this information in your laptop, before you forget all the ideas you came up with.  Once you’re properly situated in front of the screen, you pump yourself up, turn on the creative portion of your brain, and start tapping at the keys.

No matter how hard you try to motivate yourself, it’s inevitable that your writing session descends into chaos.  Your creative side won’t come up with enough ideas to advance your story or develop character (or you’re just not in a writing mood because the Patriots are playing), leaving plot holes that you have to fill.  You’ll spill your drink, forcing you to put your ideas aside and grab some paper towels before your laptop electrocutes you.  Or your file will become infected with a virus.  Sometimes you can shut down and restart, but laptops can be temperamental, so you find yourself running over to Best Buy to see if the Geek Squad can save your work.    

From the moment they hear me talk about my manuscript, everyone thinks they, too, can write a novel.  They’ll come up to me and say, “Oh yeah I’m gonna write a novel one of these days,” as if all you have to do is spend a weekend typing a bunch of words and voila, it’ll be in stores the following Tuesday at midnight.  They’ll spend this coming weekend doing exactly that, until they realize that it takes hard work and determination, and they don’t have the patience to devote an insane amount of time to writing 300 pages of prose in a coherent, engaging format.

So, there you have it.  Managing a warehouse and writing a novel couldn’t be more similar.  And explaining this to would be novelists and managers tends to scare both off the task.  Which is probably a good thing.

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Phil Lemos is a current degree candidate at Southern New Hampshire University's Low Residency MFA in Fiction and Nonfiction.